He gave up at dinnertime, drove to Blue Earth, and ate at a Country Kitchen, then sat in his truck in the parking lot and talked to Frankie for a half hour. As he was talking to her, he saw Banning, the sheriff’s deputy, and a man walk into the restaurant. He said good-bye to Frankie and followed them in. Banning saw him and waved from her booth, introduced the man as her boyfriend, Gabe, and said that Fischer would be in the hospital overnight.

“She had a headache, and they thought she might be concussed, though . . . not badly. They also want a specialist to take a look at her eye. He wasn’t there today, so he’ll look in the morning.”

“Worse than I thought,” Virgil said.

She shrugged, and said, “We did the only thing we could—we took her to the hospital. Next, we get all over Larry’s ass. Sheriff Zimmer came by and took a look at Jennie, and said Larry’s used up all his rope. If he drives twenty-six in a twenty-five zone, he’ll regret it.”

Virgil drove back to Wheatfield, parked next to the Vissers’ house, lay on his bed for a while. An hour after dark, when everything was quiet, he went back out for a walk. Fischer’s tiny house was set back from the street; he checked around for obvious eyes, saw not much, tried the screen door, which opened up. The blade of his butter knife slipped the old lock, and he was inside.

He had a simple excuse, if anybody asked: he’d been walking by the house when he noticed the screen door standing open, and, when he tried the door, it was unlocked. He knew Fischer was in the hospital, but, given her history with Van Den Berg, he thought he’d better check the house.

Not search it, simply check it. He turned on the lights—nothing attracts the eye like a flashlight in a dark house—and checked it thoroughly, made sure that nobody was hiding in her closet or her bureau drawers or even under her unmade bed.

There was nothing under her bed, but a stamp-sized patch of blue cloth was sticking out from between the mattress and the box springs. When he lifted the mattress, he found a thoroughly flattened garment. He shook it out, and thought, by golly, it looked a lot like the gown that the Virgin Mary had been wearing in the church photograph.

Holland, Skinner, and Fischer: the Wheatfield Trinity.

He put everything back, turned off the lights, locked the door, and ambled back to the Vissers’ place. Danielle Visser knocked on the connecting door when she heard him stirring around and, when he opened it, asked, “Roy and I couldn’t stand it anymore: did you find out anything interesting today?”

“Not a thing,” he said. “This is a very opaque little town.”